A review of Martin Empson, Marxism and ecology (2009).
The SWP has been agitating on climate change for several years – particularly through the Campaign against Climate Change (CaCC). As such its members present themselves as the “best builders” of the “united front”. On a certain level this has been effective: some SWP members have played a positive role in bringing climate issues into the labour movement and they have been pivotal to the trade union conferences of the CaCC. Like the AWL, many SWP members also threw themselves into the Vestas dispute last year.
However Marxists have higher criteria then straightforward activism. The SWP claims to be the revolutionary party of the working class. If this were true, then one might expect a distinctive and original contribution by the SWP to theorising ecological politics. However the SWP’s corpus on these questions is generally defined by its blandness, a cross between Greenpeace-lite admonishing of the government, laced with a dose of Monbiot and a dash of socialism. This is epitomised by Jonathan Neale’s book, Stop global warming (2008).
Martin Empson has played a key role is building the CaCC trade union campaign in an open and inclusive fashion. Therefore his booklet Marxism and ecology is welcome opportunity to assess how the SWP is theorising its ecological work. Empson makes a number of reasonable arguments: capitalism is not sustainable; revolutionary transformation is necessary; workers should be at the heart of the climate movement; socialism is the answer; and the Marxist tradition on ecology has been largely forgotten or dismissed. The pamphlet is a good summary of John Bellamy Foster’s contribution on these questions.
However the pamphlet does not contain a strong critique of Foster and other dominant ecosocialist currents. Empson ventures no critical evaluation of the semi-Stalinist/Maoist politics of Foster. In his book, Ecology against Capitalism, Foster wrote: “The history of the non-capitalist world offers a few glimpses of other possibilities. The Soviet model, followed by most other countries in Eastern Europe, offers no help on this issue because it closely copied many of the methods used in the United States… However in China under Mao things were different… Mao’s emphasis on local food self-sufficiency in each region helped to reinforce these practices [cycling nutrients to maintain soil fertility] and together with the encouragement of local industry, slowed down urbanisation at the same time as impressive advances were made in agricultural production.” (2002 p.167)
Similarly, ecosocialist Joel Kovel quite explicitly rejects the claim the working class is the agent of socialism. In his book, The Enemy of Nature, he wrote that the agency of eco-socialism “can be found almost anywhere” and that there is “no privileged agent of ecosocialist transformation”. Kovel argues against Marxists like the AWL: “One at times hears complaints from this quarter that the argument advanced in this work undercuts the ‘privileged’ role to be played by the international proletariat in socialist revolution. Well yes, it is true that the imminence of planetary eco-collapse reconfigures the project of resistance to capital. That is simply a manifestation of the need for Marxists to keep in touch with reality”. (2007 p.241, p.257)
Foster, Kovel and others like Derek Wall make positive comments about the governments of Cuba and Venezuela, despite what these regimes do to the working class and to the independent labour movement. This goes to show that ecosocialism is a slippery formula, beneath which all kinds of “socialisms” reside. Ecosocialism cannot be taken at face value – it requires a critique. Thus far, the SWP has not provided one.
Empson’s pamphlet discusses Marx and Engels at length, but it does not go into the wider Marxist ecological tradition, which includes William Morris, Karl Kautsky, August Bebel, Lenin, Bukharin and others. Although he is rightly critical of Stalinism, Empson does not explain why even the Trotskyist (including his own Cliffite) tradition failed for many decades to reconnect Marxism and ecology.
There is one notable theoretical mistake. Empson quotes SWPer Alex Callinicos (The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx), that the productive forces represent the material side of production (the transformation of nature), while the relations of production the social side (2009 p.7). However for Marxists, the productive forces are much more than technology – social elements such human labour and science are also included. Similarly relations of production take material forms. But where Marxists should be breaking down the dualism between nature and society, Empson appears to reproduce it.
The pamphlet does not go much further in applying Marxist concepts such as metabolism to distinctive issues such as climate change. It does not explore other Marxist approaches – such as the production of nature – that arguably overcome the nature/society dualism that permeates bourgeois thought. The pamphlet does not set out a distinctive Marxist political economy that explains ecological concerns. It does at least raise the issue of class and environmental justice – for example in relation to pensioners’ fuel bills – but all this requires much more development. In short, the pamphlet lacks the depth necessary to really take Marxist ecology forward.